hypnosec writes: Microsoft Research has teamed up with the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology to develop software that can predict events like outbreaks of disease or violence by mining data from old news and the web. The project, if successful, will result into a tool that would provide information that is more than just educated guesses or intuition. To ensure that the software’s output is according to expectation, the team consisting of Eric Horvitz from Microsoft Research and Kira Radinsky from Technion-Israel Institute tested it with articles from New York Times spanning over 20 years from archives between 1986 and 2007. The test data also included data from other sources such as the web enabling the software to see more things.